


Nesting Dolls

by Cecil



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: M/M, Pregnancy, Unreliable Narrator, Victor's Unrealistic Expectations
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-31
Updated: 2017-08-31
Packaged: 2018-12-21 23:12:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 17,711
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11954694
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cecil/pseuds/Cecil
Summary: When Mari tells them she's pregnant, Yuuri's prepared to deal with weird cravings, moodiness, and disrupted sleep. He's lived with himself for 27 years, after all.What he's not expecting is Victor.





	Nesting Dolls

**Author's Note:**

> A note about potential triggers: adults having frank discussions about reproductive choices, and an oblique reference to reproductive coercion in the context of a relationship with unbalanced power dynamics.
> 
>  
> 
> ....that's sounds much bleaker than the actual story, it's really mostly fluff.

 

Mari’s in the laundry room when she answers the call. She’s propped the phone against something, so Yuuri can see a little of the underside of her chin and the corner of one of the ceiling lights. She’s off-center on Yuuri’s phone screen, leaning to her right with her chin in her hand.

  
“Sorry,” Yuuri tells her in a quiet voice. “Vitya’s in the shower, so I figured now would be a good time...”

  
“It’s fine,” Mari says.

  
“I thought he might be getting annoying,” Yuuri says.

  
Since they’d found out Mari was pregnant, Mari hasn’t been able to sneeze without Victor vowing to weed out every pollen bearing plant on the block. Yuuri needed a break. He couldn’t imagine Mari didn’t, too.

  
“You’re sure he’s not smothering you?” Yuuri asks. He’s wide awake on nervous energy, picking at the hotel comforter with his free hand. It’s a nice hotel, so the only loose threads are the ones Yuuri’s making.

  
Mari says, “Don’t worry about it.” She waves her free hand dismissively.

  
Yuuri lifts the hand he’s been picking at the comforter with up to his phone. He squints. He says, “Big sis, I don’t mean to be a nag, but is that a cigarette?”

  
Mari twirls the little birth-defect stick between her fingers in time with her eye-roll. “I already got the whole lecture from my doctor. It’s not lit, I just wanted a taste.”

  
“Ah,” Yuuri sighs, “now I sound like Vitya, right?”

  
“I told you, he’s not bothering me,” Mari repeats. Then she smirks. “Have you really not noticed?”

  
“Noticed what?” Yuuri asks warily. He’s coming off of three days of competitive skating--everything is either sharply in focus, or out of it.

  
Mari sticks the filtered end of her cigarette into her mouth and folds her arms together. “Victor is totally jealous,” Mari announces. “You haven’t told him all about your plan to have three daughters _exactly_ like your perfect big sister, yet, have you?”

  
“I was _seven_ ,” Yuuri hisses, face going red, “I can’t be held responsible for every ridiculous thing I said!”

  
Mari’s smirk turns wicked. “So you haven’t talked about it?”

  
Yuuri doesn’t say anything.

  
Mari stops smirking. “Oh,” she says.

  
Yuuri falls back against the hotel bed in minor despair.

  
“Well,” Mari says eventually, after Yuuri’s flung his arm over his eyes and hasn’t said anything for almost an entire minute, “I can’t say this is good timing.”

  
Yuuri _knows_. Four Continents is officially over, so they’re down to just Worlds for their competitions. And they’ve mutually agreed to skip all but the most immediate of the post-season ice shows this year in favor of going straight home. It’s a matter of only a few short weeks before they’re back in Hasetsu. A few more months of their life pre-baby, falling rapidly away. And the only plan they have so far is Victor retiring, which was decided on months before Mari was even pregnant.

  
The shower turns off.

  
“I gotta go,” Yuuri says, scrambling back up to a sitting position. “This conversation didn’t happen!”

  
“Later,” Mari says right before Yuuri hits the disconnect button.

  
Realistically, Yuuri has several minutes before Victor actually leaves the bathroom. But if he doesn’t want Victor to know he was just on the phone with his sister, he can’t be holding it when Victor does.

  
Yuuri flings his phone into the middle of the bed, then decides leaving his phone lying on the bed to slowly die is suspicious. He plugs it in on the far side of the bed, the side not already taken up with Victor’s things. But then what was he doing the whole time Victor was in the shower, if he wasn’t messing around on his phone and the TV’s turned off?

  
Their clothes are still in a haphazard pile right by the bathroom door. Yuuri could fold them up and put them away, except Victor usually does that, and it definitely wouldn’t have taken him the entirety of Victor’s shower just to pack their suits.

  
Yuuri’s hands are on his knees, fingers clenching tight against his bare skin, when Victor finally comes out. He’s wearing one of the hotel robes. He looks warm and soft, until he looks up and makes eye contact with Yuuri, and then he gets tense. He clears the distance between them in a few steps, but Yuuri manages to get out, “No, no, I’m ok,” before Victor panics.

  
Victor’s shoulders fall back down. He cups Yuuri’s chin with his hand and Yuuri leans up into a kiss. Victor’s only made a passing attempt at drying his hair, so water droplets slide down around Yuuri’s cheek as he pulls away.

  
“Missed you,” Victor sighs, having climbed onto the bed so he’s kneeling at Yuuri’s side.

  
“You were only taking a shower,” Yuuri tells him, but he slides one hand around Victor’s wrist and squeezes. Like rain on the pavement, Victor’s shower has drawn up the smell of his skin, heavy underneath the faint layer of his body soap. Yuuri follows it in until his mouth is right up against the side of Victor’s neck and his nose is right against Victor’s damp skin.

  
Victor shivers a little, ticklish, and hums _hmm._ Then he says, “You could have joined me.” He works one hand under Yuuri’s shirt, his right hand. Victor’s fingers are going cool out from underneath the hot water, but his ring is still warm.

  
It’s a nice touch, right up until Victor says, “Hi, big sis!” and Yuuri can feel the words in Victor’s throat against his lips.

  
Yuuri shoots backwards with all the considerable poise he’d trained into as a child.

  
Victor has taken advantage of the situation in the wrong way, leaning around Yuuri to grab his cellphone from the bedside table. Mari’s on the phone screen again, Victor’s this time instead of Yuuri’s. She’s left the laundry room for common room, which Yuuri is pretty sure was entirely for Victor’s benefit, because just behind her, their dad is waving from the kitchen.

“Hello, boys!” he calls mere seconds before there’s the aggressive hiss of water hitting a hot surface, and a cloud of steam billows up and obscures him.

  
“Hey, Victor,” Mari waves at them as the chef calls their dad’s name in alarm. The birth-defect stick is noticeably absent. “Hey, little bro.”

  
“I can’t believe you’d rather talk to my sister than make out with me,” Yuuri mumbles in Russian, drawing his legs up onto the bed and crossing them. He props his head on one hand, the way Mari had.

  
“You had your chance,” Victor tells him with a sly smile, also in Russian, without turning even a fraction away from the phone and Mari.

  
“Normally, I’d totally be here for hot guys making out,” Mari interrupts them. “But if your hands start wandering, I’m going to hang up.”

  
The flush on Victor’s neck from his shower had been fading in the cooler air of the room. Now the flush is back, and it curls right up around his ears. It’s doesn’t make Yuuri feel much better about the blush he can feel all the way down his own chest, but it’s nice to look at.

  
Like Mari didn’t say anything at all, Victor switches back to Japanese and says, “How are you feeling today, big sis? You look good! Are you eating well? You haven’t been lifting too much, have you?”

  
“Tired and bloated, sounds like a lie, but thank you, yes, and probably, but I’m used to it,” Mari answers without a stumble or pause. “Have you been kicked out of the country, yet?”

  
“Not for lack of trying,” Yuuri answers this time, “but no.”

  
“We’ll be home soon!” Victor breezes on, nonchalant before Yuuri and Mari’s back-and-forth. “I got a countdown app for my lockscreen, but it only shows the days. I have one that does the hours and minutes and seconds, too! But it’s not on the lockscreen.”

  
Mari responds with an apathetic, “Sounds rough.”

  
At Victor’s side, Yuuri nods his head with exaggerated sympathy.

  
“I saw that,” Victor informs him happily. “You’re still in the Facetime window.”

  
“Am I? I forgot,” Yuuri admits.

  
“Someone should really make a better countdown for the lockscreen, anyway,” Victor complains, looking aggrieved and sad at no one in particular since the only people around to turn it on are Yuuri and Mari.

  
After he’s finally finished fussing over Mari, asked her to give the baby his love several times, and hung up the phone, Victor pulls Yuuri down into the sheets with him. “Ok,” Victor says, “you should ravish me, now.”

 

.x.

  
Despite Mari’s advice, they don’t talk about it. They have celebratory sex, loud and a little lazy, hands wrapped around each other, and then they fall asleep.

 

.x.

  
They fly back to St. Petersburg and Yuuri spends an entire day being jetlagged. He alternates between being collapsed in a heap on the couch and collapsing in a heap on the bed. Victor does slightly better in that he eats three different times, although he eats with his eyes closed and the food combinations, such as they are, can all conveniently be eaten cold.

  
They go back to the rink.

  
At practice, Yuuri steps off the ice and bends down to put on his skate guards. When he stands back up, Yuri is charging at him from the other side of the rink.

  
Yuuri sits down on the bench. He pulls Victor’s gear bag over and roots around for a protein bar.

  
“Hey,” Yuri barks, punctuated by his hands slapping the boards and his skates carving up enough shaved ice for a paper cone, “Yuuko says your sister is pregnant.”

  
Yuuri’s already unwrapping a cherry and almond bar when he realizes Yuri means for this to be a conversation, not a tirade. “Um, yes. Yes?”

  
“What the hell are you _doing?_ ” Yuri snaps at him.

  
“I’m taking a break,” Yuuri shrugs, trying to disengage. “I think I earned it. I did get gold at Four Continents.”

  
Yuri slaps the boards again and yells, “Only because I could not compete!”

  
There’s a pretty universal sound that people use when they’re grossed-out or angry, that kind of sounds like throwing up. There’s another one, the one people make by clicking their tongues against their teeth, when they’ve judged all of someone else’s life choices and found them wanting. The way Yuri speaks Russian mostly sounds like a disharmonious duet of the two.

  
Yuuri tears off half the protein bar with one bite. His break isn’t going to last much longer, and it would be a lot more pleasant if Yuri wasn’t trying to loom intimidatingly over him. It’s still not very effective, but it’s also not as much work as it was before. Yuri’s getting lanky, stretching slowly upward. If he got in Yuuri’s face to call him a loser or an idiot now, he wouldn’t even have to get on his tiptoes.

  
Actually, Yuuri has a nagging feeling that Yuri is going to be taller than him when he finally finishes growing.

  
“I mean, why aren’t you in Hasetsu?” Yuri grouses, folding his arms together.

  
Yuuri chews through a gummy dried cherry and then tells Yuri, “It’s the middle of the season. I can’t just take off.”

  
“Not like Victor hasn’t followed you all the way home before,” Yuri complains, insinuating Victor’s tendency to recklessness is invasive and something to be ashamed of, without any concession to how even at his worst, Victor is motivated by all the right reasons. “So she’s really pregnant?”

  
“Yes?” Yuuri confirms.

  
“Like, there’s a--a tiny parasite person in her stomach, sucking all the nutrients from her blood and squishing all her organs and stuff?” Yuri asks, clearly worried that he’d opened the conversation on a topic Yuuri doesn’t have the words for in Russian, and now they’re talking about entirely different concepts.

  
“It’s like blueberry-sized right now,” Yuuri protests defensively.

  
Yuri says, “That sounds fucking dangerous. Aren’t you worried?”

  
“No,” Yuuri tells him, then he realizes, “Wait, are you?”

  
“Shut up!” Yuri snaps, and throws himself backwards, away from the boards. “I’m going to crush you at Worlds!” he vows as he glides away. Then he screams, whirls around, and skates off into a triple axel in a well-intentioned but poor attempt at decompression.

  
Victor whistles and claps. He shouts, “Getting much better, Yura!”

  
“Wow,” Yuuri mutters to himself, then stuffs the second half of the protein bar into his mouth.

  
(He hopes Victor didn’t see the way he finished the bar. Victor’s always weird about stuff like that.)

  
.x.

  
They take gold and bronze and silver at Worlds. No one is at all surprised, but a few are hostile.

  
Chris isn’t one of them. “What am I supposed to do, murder you?” he asks at the bar after the gala.

  
They’ve made a pact about not drinking in front of sponsors. Yuuri insisted.

  
“Or you could just train more,” Mila says with all the ruthless dispassion due the first ever figure skater to land a quad axel in competition.

  
On the table directly in front of her, there’s an orderly wedge of empty shot glasses lined up like a memorial to a brutal war. She got gold, like she’s gotten gold at nearly every competition this year, but she’s maudlin about it because Sara’s been out with a serious injury since before the season even started in October, and she’s probably not coming back next year.

  
Chris drawls,“Darling Vitka’s scores were already insane before he was happy--”

  
“I am _very_ happy!” Victor tells their half of the bar. “Yuuri makes me happy!” he clarifies, leaning in toward Chris. “ _So_ happy, Chris.”

  
“That’s good, Vitya,” Chris says, and pats Victor’s cheek lovingly.

  
Victor reaches out and catches Chris’s hand with his free one before Chris can pull it away. “Chris,” he says, “did you know _Mari’s pregnant?_ ”

  
“You mentioned it,” Mila contributes from Chris’s other side.

  
“Mila,” Victor shouts, leaning around Chris. He’s still holding Chris’s hand in place, but doesn’t seem to have noticed. “Don’t have babies until you want to, keep skating! Fuck the federation!”

  
“Not if they bring the condoms,” Mila replies darkly.

  
There’s a beat.

  
“That’s appalling,” Chris says, and finally pulls his hand out of Victor’s, which draws Victor’s attention back around to him.

  
“Chris,” Victor says. “Chris.”

  
“Yes, Vitya,” Chris sighs, leaning the other way, towards Mila.

  
“Have you seen Yuuri?” Victor asks.

  
Chris trades an amused and faintly alarmed look with Mila. “You’re holding him, Vitya.”

  
He’s not quite: he’s holding Yuuri’s arm, clutched around his stomach. He is, in fact, holding Yuuri’s arm a little too tightly. Yuuri feels a bit like a safety belt, keeping Victor from spiraling off into some fiery disaster, but he isn’t complaining. The way that Victor’s wrapped Yuuri’s arm around him, Yuuri is draped over Victor’s back with his cheek pressed against the side of Victor’s head. Victor’s head is warm under the soft layer of his hair. It reminds Yuuri of lying in bed at home, at the end of the night after a long day of practice, or on rest days when they hadn’t gone anywhere at all. It feels really good, is the point. Yuuri yawns.

  
“Looks like it’s Yura’s bedtime,” Mila says.

  
“ _Yes_ ,” Victor says cheerfully, “it definitely is.” He pulls out his phone, somehow coordinates himself enough to unlock it, and navigates to his contacts. Mila watches with her eyebrows raised and her lips curled up in a half smile. But she’s watching _Yuuri_ instead of Victor. Yuuri’s not even doing anything.

  
She looks confused when Victor starts talking into his phone in Russian. He’s saying, “And if you’re not back in your room yet, you _should_ be, it’s past your curfew!”

  
“Wait,” Mila says just as Chris drops his head on the table and thumps his fist down beside it a few times.

  
“Did you call little Yuri?” Chris demands around full, rolling laughs.

  
Victor is holding the phone away from his ear now with a disgruntled expression. It’s too loud in the bar, but Yuri must be bellowing on the other end because Yuuri definitely recognizes the voice.

  
Yuuri pulls away from Victor’s back just enough to give himself the clearance to take the phone from Victor’s hand. He puts it up to his ear and says, “Yuri,” and then stops, distracted by saying his own name. “Yuri-o. Yurio, it really is important to get enough sleep. Even if you don’t have training again until next week.”

  
He may have said that in Japanese.

  
“Is Mila there?” Yuri demands while Yuuri is trying to convince him that there will be plenty of time to go club hopping when he isn’t actively competing.

  
“Mila is older than you, Yuri,” Yuuri says, but Yuri has hung up and Yuuri is speaking to dead air. He stares at the phone, puzzled, and then shrugs and tries to put it in his pants pocket. He misses. Chris saves the phone from a messy fall, and sets it on the table between himself and Mila.

  
Just as Chris puts Victor’s phone down, Mila’s starts buzzing, knocking gently into the nearest glass as the screen lights up with Yuri’s name.

  
Mila’s face says very clearly that she doesn’t think she should answer, but she picks it up anyway because that’s what being rinkmates means.

  
“What?” she says. Then she says, “Victor’s Russian, and, also, an adult. I’m not his mother.” After a few more moments, she coos, “Aw, did they cut your date short?”

  
“Who is Yura on a _date with?_ ” Victor demands. His good humor has entirely disappeared.

  
“It didn’t sound like a date,” Yuuri says soothingly in an attempt to talk Victor back down to happily drunk, “it was way too quiet to be someplace public.”

  
His excellent deduction does not have the intended effect. “Is it Otabek?” Victor shouts at Mila, who ignores him. “It better not be Otabek!”

  
“You like Otabek,” Yuuri reminds him. “He’s a good kid. A good--young adult.”

  
“Exactly!” There’s a distinctly aggressive air to Victor’s agreement. “Yura is a bad influence!”

  
“So,” Yuuri tries to follow his logic, “you don’t want them to hang out because you like Otabek?”

  
“No, I do not like Otabek,” Victor corrects him, “because he always says yes to all of Yura’s outrageous ideas.”

  
Chris says to Mila, “Ask if he needs lube. Or condoms.”

  
Mila gives a Chris a scornful look. “Yura isn’t _new_ , Chris,” she tells him sharply. Then Mila says into the phone, “Chris says he can bring you lube if you forgot it.”

  
There’s a few more moments of loud screeching, which Yuuri can hear across the table and over the noise of their fellow bar goers, and then it’s silent again except for the college-aged kids with an improbably high empty-pitcher-to-table ratio three tables over.

  
Mila laughs when she tosses her phone back onto the table. “You know, flip phones were really wasted in a pre-Yuri era,” she says, as if they weren't mostly a pre-Mila era, too. She signals a waiter, and jerking her thumb at Victor and Yuuri, she tells Chris, “Time to settle up. We probably really should send these idiots to bed before they kill themselves with alcohol.”

  
“But I’m Russian,” Victor protests, then says it several more times in Russian while they take turns sliding over their bank cards.

  
Victor doesn’t want to get out of his chair when they’re all ready to leave, so Yuuri puts his shoulder under Victor’s armpit and hauls him up. Suddenly, Victor is the very spirit of cooperative.

  
“Are you taking me home?” Victor asks, wrapped around Yuuri like sticky pasta. He grabs Yuuri’s ass and tries to leer, and immediately trips over his chair. Yuuri grabs Victor tightly by his waist before Victor topples them both down to the floor.

  
They’re of a height with most of Victor’s weight surrendered to Yuuri’s arms and his knees folded under him.

  
“Should I just carry you up to the room?” Yuuri asks.

  
Chris clutches Mila’s shoulder and whimpers, “Hold me.”

  
“No, he will not,” Victor replies immediately, face twisting into a pissy expression. “Don’t hold Chris, ok, Yuuri?”

  
“I don’t want to hold Chris,” Yuuri tells him honestly and honestly bewildered. Victor’s expression smooths back out.

  
“Just me?” Victor breathes against Yuuri’s mouth.

  
“Just you,” Yuuri promises.

  
Chris looks away. Very quietly, he says, “Shit. I need to call my fiance.”

  
Mila pulls out her phone and starts snapping pictures.

  
“Mila,” Yuuri groans and maybe even growls a little.

  
“Come on Yuuri, be kind,” Mila says, “think of poor Sara, all alone at home.”

  
“Isn’t she in Florence, though?” Yuuri replies. He stops to consider it for a few moments. “Isn’t she--her brother did an ice show? And Emil and Cao and. Others?”

  
“Poor Sara, all alone with her brother and Emil,” Mila amends seamlessly. “Think of her, stuck in an indifferent hotel room in some far off exotic city with those two.”

  
“Yikes,” Victor whispers, eyebrows shooting up his forehead.

  
“Do I have to?” Yuuri asks.

  
“Why do you have to make this weird?” Mila complains, and takes several more pictures out of spite.

  
“I am going to be sick,” Chris announces suddenly. “Not in the fun way.” He starts herding them between the packed tables and dim lights.

  
“Wait,” Yuuri says at length as they finally all find their way to the hotel lobby. “Florence is in Italy! They’re from Italy! That’s not exotic, Mila!”

  
“Well, I’ve never been there,” Mila shrugs.

  
Chris stalks ahead to hit the button for the elevator.

  
“So have Sara invite you!”

  
The noise level has dropped significantly. Yuuri notices, because one of the people behind the reception desk is giving him a reprimanding look for still talking loudly enough to be heard in the bar. Either that, or it’s more obvious he’s palming Victor through the front of his pants than he’d assumed.

  
It’s probably really obvious. Victor’s panting like he just finished the lead role in an ice show and he’s never heard of proper breathing techniques, even though they’re just walking across the lobby.

  
Mila raises her eyebrows and narrows her gaze in judgment. Again, Yuuri isn’t sure if this is about his words or his roaming hands. Mila, at least, is kind enough to clarify. She snaps at him, “Have Sara invite me to be stuck in a hotel room with Emil and Mickey instead?”

  
“Please,” Chris groans from the elevator, where he’s holding open the doors with one hand, “get in this goddamn elevator before I throw up on all of you and then leave you here.”

  
.x.

  
Victor announces he’s really definitely for real retiring right after Worlds. Like most things Victor announces, he _decides_ he’s going to do it several months before.

  
He tells Yuuri in August, at least (progress!), well before the season even starts.

  
“Why?” Yuuri asks, setting down his knife on the cutting board. They’re supposed to be cooking dinner, but he wants to give Victor his full attention. Also, his hand may be trembling a little, and the knife makes it more obvious. Victor had gone to the doctor that morning. A routine check-up.

  
Victor says, “Because,” and then he stops. He looks up from the slow sizzle of butter melting across the big pan they’re using, and all the evening light from the kitchen window is in his eyes. He reaches forward and puts the open palm of his hand on the back of Yuuri’s neck. “Because I’m happy.”

  
Yuuri’s hand is steady, but his heart is beating like he’s in the middle of the longest step sequence of his life. He smiles at Victor. “You’re happy? You’re sure?”

  
“Yes, definitely. I’d forgotten.” He closes his eyes. His eyelashes are golden. “So, I’ll make this my last season as a competitor.”

  
“You don’t want me to retire with you?” Yuuri asks.

  
He doesn’t know what he wants Victor’s answer to be.

  
Victor just laughs, low and warm, and says, “Yuuri, if you retire, what am I supposed to do with my retirement?”

  
_So many things_ , Yuuri thinks to himself. He cups Victor’s cheek and brushes his thumb along his cheekbone. Victor isn’t ready to hear that yet.

What Yuuri does say is, “Me,” and then once Victor catches his breath again from the bright, startled noise he’d made, Yuuri tells him, “Vitya. Anything, ok? It doesn’t matter. I’m just really happy you’re happy.”

  
Victor pulls Yuuri’s hand away and kisses his ring. “Mm,” he agrees and opens his eyes. “But let’s not tell Yura.”

  
Yuuri laughs, this time.

  
In the three years since he became Yuuri’s coach, lots of people have said Victor’s retiring with varying frequency and certainty. Usually, they say it when Yuuri gets gold instead of him, or when he gets gold instead of Yuuri.

  
Victor only says it once. In a well-crafted press-release, silver medal just short of blinding among the sequins on his chest, Victor says how grateful he’s been to have the career he’s had, but now he wants to dedicate himself fully to the next stage of his life.

  
It’s all very tasteful.

 

.x.

  
Then, the day before they get on a plane back to Hasetsu for the off-season, Victor gets photographed in a trendy boutique downtown, shopping for baby clothes.

  
Victor blames the journalists for being unscrupulous and nosy, but Victor was Russia’s darling for the entirety of his tumultuous early 20s, ok, he knew _exactly_ what he was doing.

  
“Yuuri,” Victor whines outside Mari’s bedroom door back at the inn in Hasetsu. “Don’t be like that. I just wanted the baby to have something to remind her of her Russian heritage.”

  
“What Russian heritage,” Yuuri calls back. He knows he’s being petulant. He doesn’t care.

  
“ _Yuuri_ ,” Victor gasps, adding several extra syllables to his name.

  
Yuuri is unmoved. Yuuri is lying on his side on Mari’s bed, wearing the same clothes he rode on the plane in. His head is in Mari’s lap, where there’s still room for now for his messy hair and his embarrassed sulk, bracketed by his sister’s arms.

  
Mari is playing an old game on her black 3DS. She’s holding it pretty much at Yuuri’s eye level, which is probably uncomfortably too low for her. Occasionally, when her characters are in the middle of a combo, she flicks Yuuri in the head for squirming or otherwise annoying her. Like now.

  
“Ow,” Yuuri mumbles.

  
There’s a thud outside the door. It’s either Victor or Makkachin.

  
“Oh, behind you--” Yuuri says, trying to hold still.

  
“I got it,” Mari says, and swings around to catch several Noise that spawned at her character’s back. “Fuckers.”

  
“You know, if you paid more attention to the fashion,” Yuuri starts, but Mari’s arm presses up and flattens the shell of his ear as she swipes through a combo that finishes off the boss. He hums in approval. “Yeah,” he says on an exhale, smiling, “got him.”

  
“Fashion’s not important, Yuuri,” Mari tells him, uncrushing his ear. She lifts the game slightly away and cycles one-handed through the post-boss cutscene. Neither of them pays it much attention. They’ve seen it plenty of times before.

  
Every now and then, there are soft thuds from outside the door. Probably Makkachin thumping her tail against the hardwood. Yuuri feels a little guilty for leaving her alone with a moping Victor, but it would be worse, to open the door. To let her in and leave Victor on his own. That would be cruel.

  
“Did you turn off your phone again?” Mari asks after she’s saved and flipped the lid of her DS closed. “I’ve got like 15 messages from Phichit and Yurio just since you walked in the front door.”

  
“I had to,” Yuuri defends himself in an unconvincing mumble, “it was _everywhere._ ”

  
“Poor Yuuri,” Mari singsongs. “Everyone just loves him so much.”

  
Yuuri squirms and then turns over flat on his back. He looks up at Mari’s gently teasing expression. He used to do this a lot when he was younger, whenever he was tired or lonely or just plain scared. Yuuri would tuck himself into his big sister’s arms and bury his head against her chest. He did it right up until the day he left for the States.

  
He’d been smaller, then. Mari had still been big enough to wrap him up and block out the world with just her arms. But it’s been years since Yuuri left home, and he’s grown a lot in that time. Yuuri’s starting to worry he may have grown too much, that he’s shed Mari’s embrace like too small clothes, and she couldn’t wrap her arms around him if she tried. Looking up at her now, he feels a tiny void opening up in his stomach. It pulls sharply at his lungs, until he thinks he won't be able to take the next breath, or the next.

  
“I’m sorry,” Yuuri tells her, “I know this isn’t what you wanted.”

  
Mari scoffs, “This is exactly what you wanted. To be famous. I want that for you.” She brushes some of his hair off of his forehead, gentle as the breeze off the ocean. Then she says, “I also want a haircut for you.”

  
It’s actually not that long. He can tuck it behind it his ears, or pull the top and sides back in a ponytail, but it always escapes again and falls back to where it was. It’s that length.

  
Mari of the half-bleached hair and multiple piercings complains, “You look like a punk. Do they not have barbers in Russia?”

  
“Vitya likes it,” Yuuri retorts, knowing he sounds petulant again. Then he considers what he’s said is potentially even more embarrassing than the long hair and blushes.

  
“You could let the girls braid it first, though,” Mari says, meaning Yuuko’s triplets. “They’d probably like that.”

  
“They’d probably tangle it all up and make it hurt,” Yuuri grumbles, making a face and zero promises about getting it cut.

  
He does not mention that Victor is excellent at braiding hair. That can stay his and Yura’s secret. And the baby’s, when she arrives.

  
.x.

  
The weather is unseasonably warm their first week back in Hasestu. In fact, it’s almost unbearable, though Yuuri recognizes that’s mostly his recent return from St. Petersburg talking. Everyone else seems to be enjoying it.

  
Yuuri’s mom kicks them out of the inn during the day, right when the guests are at their most active. She insists Victor’s Japanese has become too rusty to be of any use around the kitchen or the baths. “Go haggle for some fish!” she tells them, “If you get it cheaper than 700 yen, you can help me out in the springs. Not before!”

  
Not helping out at the springs--and trying to stay out from underfoot--doesn’t leave much for them to do in a town the size of Hasetsu. Yuuri needs to train eventually, but not yet, and Victor officially only has to skate when he wants to, which apparently he doesn’t. So they’d packed all of their gear in with the “to be shipped” bulk of the apartment in St. Petersburg. Yuuri doubts it’ll show up for another few weeks.

  
He feels weird, not skating. He feels heavy and clumsy, stomping around the streets he’d trained in at dawn with Minako. He doesn’t know what to do with his hands.

  
He doesn’t know how Victor can stand it.

  
But Victor does. Victor drags him to the bars, to the parks where the sakura trees have already lost all their petals, to the beach where the top of the sand is baked to a painful heat by the sun, but underneath is just the right level of cozy warm. Victor smiles the whole time. He’s so light.

  
So Yuuri tries. He drinks sweet, pink drinks. He rolls Victor in the grass when he thinks no one’s watching them, kisses all the skin his clothes leave bare. He picks Makkachin up around her middle and wades into the rolling surf until the salt water hits his waist, and he tries to remember how to float.

  
“That water has to be freezing,” Mari says when they arrive back home, obviously judging, but she gives them towels so they can dry off instead of dripping all over the floor and creating a water hazard.

  
“It’s ok!” Victor beams at her. He’s wet all over, and a puddle is slowly forming under him while he rubs a towel over Makkachin’s back. “Russia’s much colder!”

  
.x.

  
The first time Makkachin abandons Victor’s side for Mari is very nearly devastating.

  
It’s in the morning. Yuuri leaves Makkachin, who has always been partial to lazy cuddles but really prefers to pick a spot and lie in it these days, curled up in the bed with Victor, and he goes to have breakfast with his sister.

Yuuri and Mari have already been sitting across the table from each other for several minutes when Victor comes down the hall with Makkachin in his arms. He sets her on her feet at the door, raises his hand to Mari in greeting, and then sits down nearly on top of Yuuri, bunching him up between the table and Victor’s own long limbs. He’s only barely awake, and it’s only the three of them, so Yuuri lets him nuzzle into his shoulder without protest.

  
Makkachin shuffles up to the table, but then stops dead half a meter away and sits on her haunches.

  
Yuuri stares. Makkachin stares back.

  
Victor lifts his head from Yuuri’s shoulder. “C’mere, Makka girl,” he calls her drowsily, still wrapped all the way around Yuuri, and Makkachin does not come.

  
Mari’s eyebrows go up.

  
“Makkachin?” Victor calls, immediately awake. His grip on Yuuri tightens.

  
Heart hammering painfully against his rib cage, Yuuri asks, “Is she sick?” He twists around to see what is probably his own panicked expression mirrored on Victor’s face. “Did she seem sick last night? She ate, right? She was fine.” He left his phone in the bedroom. He can’t remember the number for Makkachin’s vet here.

  
Makkachin sweeps her tail along the floor, then turns deliberately toward Mari.

  
There’s a long moment of silence.

  
“ _Oh,_ ” Victor exclaims as Makkachin goes to lie down beside Mari.

  
“Is that normal?” Mari asks, eyebrows sinking down into a suspicious stare at Makkachin, plastered to her side.

  
“Yes,” Victor declares, “I mean no, Makka, you brilliant girl! Yuuri, look at Makkachin, she is the best.”

  
It keeps happening, after that. Makkachin is less mobile than she was in years past --they’ve been carrying her up and down the stairs for a while now-- but Makkachin keeps pace with Mari through the inn and the baths. If Mari’s at the front desk, Makkachin is behind it, curled at her feet. When Mari goes to sweep the tiles around the outside baths, Makkachin sits just outside of the showers, where she can survey Mari’s progress.

  
She doesn’t ignore Victor, though. She doesn’t have to--Victor is inevitably doing the same thing.

  
“Seriously,” Mari commands Yuuri while Yuuri tries not to look too much like this is all entirely out of his control, “call off your guard dogs. It’s the baths. What do they think is going to happen?”

  
“You might fall,” Victor says immediately. “You might get dizzy, or there could be water, or a rude guest might bump into you--”

  
“I might bump into _you_ ,” Mari says meaningfully, poking Victor in the chest. “I grew up here. I _live_ here. You think something bad is going to happen?”

  
Victor’s expression goes very serious and he draws himself all the way up, so the several centimeters difference in their height is obvious. “No,” he says to Mari, “nothing bad is going to happen to you.”

  
Mari gives Yuuri a pointed look. “Go take them on a _walk._ ”

  
Yuuri takes them out on a walk.

  
Makkachin needs a nap afterwards, which she takes on top of Mari’s feet.

  
.x.

  
Mari gains weight slowly. By three months, she barely has a bump, and by four, Axel, Lutz, and Loop have started casting skeptical looks at her profile.

  
“You’re not eating enough,” Victor nags.

  
“I’m eating even more than the doctor recommended,” Mari counters every time.

  
She is. She’s just throwing everything back up.

  
Mari’s had morning sickness since week 5. Perfectly textbook, Victor had declared with the same sort of enthusiasm as when plans for new choreography turn out exactly the way they had in his head. He’s bought many books on pregnancy. They’re exclusively in Russian, but Yuuri’s also caught Victor huddled suspiciously with Yuuko over glossy pamphlets with trailing lines of kanji or, sometimes, Yuuko’s phone.

  
Now, halfway through April, Mari’s continued morning sickness is a lot less textbook. She still spends several minutes retching into the the toilet, two or three times a day, every day.

  
Yuuri does not love his sister enough to clean the bathroom for her after she’s been sick. He does inarguably love her, though, in the tender and profound way of little brothers. Yuuri stands at a safe distance, like the other end of the hallway, and after she’s finished washing away the contents of her stomach, he says, “Your daughter is going to be gorgeous.” Every time.

  
Their mom makes ginger beef for a week straight. It has always been Mari’s absolute favorite dish. Now, it’s the only thing that doesn’t make her nauseous. Their mom makes it for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and two additional snacks. Their dad is horrible at making ginger beef, but does fair to amazing with other dishes, and takes over the family dinner in addition to lunch and breakfast. This makes three total people in the kitchen, their dad, their mom, and the chef, when there’s really only room for two.

  
Victor feels bad about Yuuri’s parents making two separate meals for the family at every meal because he did not know Mari and Yuuri when they were 4. He’s stuck it out with the ginger beef.

  
Yuuri, who also feels guilty about making either of his parents cook special meals now that he’s a considerate adult, hates ginger beef. He’s spent his prime learning-to-cook years in the States, though, and then Russia, so the only foods he’s mastered and can get ingredients for in Hasetsu are pork cutlet, udon, and miso soup. None of these is particularly advised in his diet, even in the off-season.

  
The end result is a sense of disjoint at the family dining table. They’re intentional about eating together, but there’s no cohesion with so many of the plates representing a completely separate meal plan. The meals do not look like the meals of their childhood. But Mari looks less miserable and starts gaining weight again, so obviously it’s worth it.

  
In the afternoon of day six of Mari’s all-ginger-beef jag, the clouds are all feathered wisps and the sun is in full force, so for once, there are more tourists at the beach than at the hot springs. Minako comes over for tea in the downtime. This is code for midday sake with their mother.

  
Their mom and Minako make it all the way to pulling out a new bottle before a guest starts complaining about the water in the cold spring being too cold, and then their mother has to excuse herself to go deal with it. That leaves Minako sitting at one of the inn’s table with Mari, Yuuri, Makkachin, and Victor while Mari’s having her third meal of the day.

  
Minako glances once at Makkachin, who is lying pressed up against Mari’s thigh, and then at the pile of food in front of Mari.

  
“Only thing I can keep down,” Mari’s explains, but Mianko just groans in commiseration, “Ugh. I couldn’t stand pork when I was pregnant.”

  
“You have kids?” Victor asks, shooting straight up from the table in surprise.

  
Yuuri drops the hand he was smoothing over the short hairs at the back of Victor’s neck with down to his waist instead.

  
Minako snorts. “Wow, no. Can you imagine me with children?”

  
Yuuri mostly chokes back a laugh. What comes out of him instead is a little high-pitched squeak a lot like a balloon losing air. “Minako-sensei, you did ok with me.”

  
“I did _fucking_ amazing with you,” Minako declares, leveling an accusatory finger right between his eyes. “I did an extraordinary job, which you should be grateful for. And your husband, too.”

  
“I am,” Yuuri says, nodding enthusiastically. He elbows Victor. Victor gives no indication that he noticed. “Definitely.”

  
Minako spreads her palms on the floor behind her and settles back, leaning slightly away from the table. “Damn right.”

  
“But you don’t, why aren’t--” Victor stutters over his own tongue, chasing words in circles in Japanese. “Did something--happen?”

  
“What?” Minako squints at him.

  
Victor gives up and switches to English.“You said you were pregnant, but you don’t have kids. Was there something wrong?”

  
Victor has become _worryingly_ obsessed with fatal genetic anomalies recently.

  
“Not as far as I know,” Minako tells Victor.

  
As far as Yuuri knows, Minako had a perfectly ordinary eleven weeks of being pregnant, a long time ago, approximately a month after Yuuri himself was born. His mom mentioned it sometimes, what could have been. But very rarely. Usually when Takeshi had been in a particularly nasty mood, or school was especially lonely. His mom always wished he had more friends as a child.

  
Victor stares at Minako. His expression is fixed in the same way it is when Yuri’s off the ice and doesn’t know Victor’s watching him.

  
Meanwhile, Yuuri’s body is doing the thing again where his brain tells his lungs to keep bringing in air, and his lungs, rebelliously, don’t. His chest aches while he watches his teacher scrutinizing his husband like she’s not sure whether or not they’ve met before.

  
“Oh,” Victor says, eventually. Then he says, a little softer, “Oh.”

  
“Yeah,” Minako tells him, “I decided I didn’t want kids.”

  
“You knew for sure?” Victor asks.

  
Minako says, “Yes,” and meets his eyes without smiling.

  
Yuuri’ s hand is still on Victor’s waist.

  
“If you know,” Victor says, slow and deliberate, “I think, then, that’s really the best choice.”

  
Yuuri’s body remembers how to do the whole breathing thing again. Victor grabs Yuuri’s hand and pulls it around to settle low over his stomach. He puts his palm on top of Yuuri’s palm, and slides his fingers underneath. Yuuri strokes the invisible path of hair down Victor’s stomach through his shirt with his thumb, but Victor doesn’t respond.

  
“Are we done talking about this now?” Minako asks.

  
“We’re done talking about this now,” Mari decides. “Someone turn on the TV. There has to be something decent on.”

  
“At this time of the day?” Yuuri says. “Just game shows.”

  
“Yes,” Mari snaps her fingers imperiously, “put one of those on.”

  
“It’ll be good for Vitya’s Japanese practice,” Yuuri teases. This time Victor squeezes his hand.

  
.x.

  
Mari’s morning sickness finally ends when she’s 18 weeks along. Victor decides this warrants a celebratory dinner. It’s a themed meal: every dish includes mango.

  
“When you think about it,” Yuuri observes that night, just three bites into the meal, “this is actually kind of awful.”

  
Mari shrugs. “It’s not ginger beef. A few more days, and I thought I was going to end up hating it forever.”

  
“But, I mean, if we’re eating so much mango because the baby’s the size of a mango,” Yuuri says, delicately picking bright orange pieces out of his salad and stacking them to the side, “aren’t we basically eating the baby?”

  
“ _Yuuri,_ ” Victor laughs and hides his face with one hand. The bridge of his nose goes red. He says a word that almost translates to penis, only he says it in Russian, so it’s a lot worse.

  
Yuuri gives him a a stern look. “This was _your_ idea,” he tells Victor, poking him with his own chopsticks.

  
His dad says, “I’m sure your husband won’t eat the real baby. Now eat your fake one.”

  
“Your dad spent a long time chopping it up!” his mom adds with great delight.

  
.x.

  
Five months in, and they still haven’t talked about the baby situation.

  
Talked about the baby, yes. Victor excitedly tells everyone that she can hear their voices as they go about their daily lives. He asks Yuuri’s mom and dad to teach him the songs they sang to Mari and Yuuri when they were little, so they do. They start Victor out with two shorts songs Yuuri remembers taking his baths to.

  
And Victor’s not--he’s not _bad_ at singing. But practice would certainly help, and Victor knows it, and Victor knows _practice_. He practices unashamed and loud.

  
Yuuri reminds himself, guiltily, that everyone does not love this man like he does.

  
His family takes it in stride, though, just like his grueling practice schedule under Minako, and the first Vicchan’s habit of getting underfoot, and every other inconvenience he’s brought his family since he was born. All of it, just neatly folded into running the inn, their everyday lives.

  
When he’s not singing, every word out of Victor’s mouth is about Mari, or the baby, or Yuuri’s theme for next year.

  
It’s no wonder Yuuri has strange dreams. In one of them, the judges are his parents, who in real life still know almost nothing about scoring figure skating. Mari stands at the boards with the baby while Yuuri does his short program. The baby is his coach; she keeps telling Yuuri to stop jumping so high or he’ll float off forever, but Yuuri is focused on his blades, which melt and melt as he skates, until he’s slipping along the ice in his bare, blistered feet. His program music is the song Victor’s been walking around mispronouncing for the past week, except it’s right in his dream, the way his father always sounded when he sang it.

  
It takes several moments after waking up for Yuuri to realize it’s not in his head. It’s Victor, back to Yuuri’s chest, crooning to Makkachin in the dark of the night.

  
His chest feels tight. Yuuri sticks his nose into Victor’s skin, somewhere along his shoulders, or his back, whatever’s closest, and feels his heartbeat slow down again, and doesn’t notice when he falls back asleep.

  
.x.

  
“I’m not saying you’re old,” Victor says to Mari at breakfast in a serene voice that completely belies the way he’d shouted, “You are _older_ than me!”, and pulled Mari around in a giddy dance on her 31st birthday two years ago.

  
“Vitya, _stop_ ,” Yuuri had said, but he was laughing, so Victor hadn’t.

  
There’d been a lot of beer at that point. Mari had eeled out of Victor’s clutch and sat back down at the table across from Yuuri. She’d huffed, “I don’t see what the big deal is,” as Victor skipped around her in sloppy circles.

  
Victor dropped down to his knees and lifted Mari’s hands in his, like a classic gentleman in proposal. He said, “No one has _ever_ been older than me.”

  
“ _What,_ ” Yuuri had giggled. “Yes, they have, Vitya.”

  
“Except Yakov. And Lilia. No.”

  
Now Victor sits beside Mari with his pajama shirt hanging half off one shoulder, the top of his hair sticking straight up and out, and his eyes bright with exhaustion. He was up until the small hours of the morning, googling increasingly distressing keywords, like “disjunction” and “congenital” and “polyetiological polypathogenic”.

  
Victor says, “I’m not saying you’re old, but you are older, big sis. And I’m not saying something will be wrong, but there’s a far greater chance something _might._ ”

  
“Please control your husband,” Mari tells Yuuri, flat as freshly resurfaced ice.

  
Yuuri yawns. “Not mine before 6:00 AM.”

  
“You are a world-class athlete, you’ve been up for hours,” Mari complains. “Take pity on the rest of us.”

  
“Sorry,” Yuuri shrugs, and twists his chopsticks in his own food. He doesn’t even look at Victor.

  
Victor leans around the corner of the table and kisses his cheek. Makkachin, who was lying between him and Mari, does not follow.

  
Victor kisses him again, behind the ear, under his jaw, on his shoulder. Yuuri tries not to laugh. Victor rubs his hand up Yuuri’s thigh under the table. Way too high for the common room. Yuuri jumps, bangs his knee on the table leg, and tips half his food out of his bowl and onto the table. Makkachin’s ears perk in alarm, until she realizes it’s just Yuuri being clumsy.

  
Now Victor laughs, “Sorry, sorry. I’ll clean it,” and rubs soothing circles against Yuuri’s stinging knee. He grabs Yuuri’s bowl and, bizarrely, Mari’s, and goes to the kitchen. When he comes back out, both of their bowls are loaded down with even more food than they’d started with.

  
Mari gives Yuuri a bewildered look. “Is he always this subtle?”

  
“Only for the people he likes,” Yuuri tells her with great solemnity.

  
.x.

  
Puberty’s been making moves on Yuri for the past year, and Yuuri is relatively sure that it’s finally going to seal the deal in the off-season.

  
Yakov apparently agrees. Most of Yuri’s calls for the past month have been him complaining about the compulsory figures Yakov’s been having him drill in between cross-training and his exhibition skates.

  
There’s no such thing as a good time for puberty, but Yuuri figures it could be worse.

  
Yuri emphatically does not.

  
“He won’t even look at any of the music I picked,” Yuri complains in what is almost an indoor voice. This is in deference to his cat, curled up precariously between his shoulder and the side of his head.

Yuri’s in a back breaking slump on the couch at Mila’s place, all the planes of his face etched out in a pale fluorescent blue. It is obvious he hasn’t forgiven them yet for Worlds, because whatever shitty horror movie he and Mila are watching has been paused so Victor and Yuuri can’t make fun of any overheard dialogue.

  
“You should come here,” Victor tells him. “Just for the summer.”

  
“Like hell,” Yuri bares his teeth. “Why would I do that?!”

  
There’s a moment where Yuuri can see Victor trying to decide whether to be nice or blunt. Yuuri’s not sure which way to go himself.

  
Yuri is indifferent to their grand moral dilemma. “You just want a free babysitter,” he accuses them, mouth set churlishly around his teeth.

  
Victor leans back against Makkachin’s sandy flank with a grin, which presses Makkachin’s body further into Yuuri’s lap. Either Victor or Yuuri is going to have to pick her up and carry her at least part way when it’s time to go home, and that’s just fine.

  
Victor tells Yuri, “You have a way with younger women. It’s a talent, Yura! You should embrace it.”

  
“Fuck you,” Yuri bites back immediately. “Why do you think I care about a shitty, gross baby anyway?”

  
“Yura,” Victor says, “you’re behaving like she won’t have you wrapped around her little finger.”

  
“How about this finger?” Yuri flips Victor the bird.

  
“No, no, I’m tallest,” Victor says dismissively, “so that one’s me. And Yuuri will be her ring finger.”

  
Yuri hangs up.

  
Victor shrugs. “He’ll call back.”

  
“You think so?” Yuuri asks. He puts a hand over his eyes, trying to block out some of the sun so he can see Victor properly.

  
It’s a nice day. Makkachin wags her tail happily and sends sand flying right into Victor’s face. Victor sputters and coughs a little, which makes Makkachin twist around in alert. She noses at his ears. She licks several large stripes up his face and leaves a spiky patch of hair on the left side of his head sticking straight out.

  
“Looks like Makkachin has a future as stylist,” Yuuri snickers.

  
“Great!” Victor laughs. “She can support us in our old age.”

  
“Which is sooner for some of us than others,” Yuuri says, and does not lift his hands out of the sand to thread through Victor’s barely thinning hair.

  
Victor sighs, but doesn’t get to answer, because his phone starts ringing again. “See, it’s Yura,” Victor says triumphantly. He hits the connect button. Yuri’s still slumped on the couch, head still framed by the navy hood of his sweatshirt, but the cat’s disappeared.

  
“So what’s Mari having anyway?” Yuri asks. “A dancer or a gymnast?”

  
“A dancer,” Victor says decisively, “how could she not?”

  
“Boring,” Yuri scoffs. “You Katsukis are really one-trick ponies.”

  
Victor puts on a shit-eating grin and says, “ _You’re_ a ballerina, Yura.”

  
“Don’t lump me in with you,” Yuri yells, and then a door on his side of the call slams open and Mila’s voice in the background calls in Russian, “Ok, the food’s here. Have they convinced you to go visit them yet, or what? I’m not watching Potya again!”

  
“You’ll watch Potya and love it!” Yuri screeches back. It’s an ugly sound that he should under no circumstances let Lilia hear and which, by all rights, he should have settled with his vocal chords before Yuuri even met him.

  
Mila appears on screen behind Yuri and grabs his ear. “I’m not your sidekick, Yura. I’m not here for your convenience.”

  
“I never said you were, let _go_ ,” Yuri huffs. Mila doesn’t let go.

  
The scene on the other side of the phone devolves into a choppy mess as Yuri flails, trying to disengage from Mila. One second, they can see Yuri’s face, the next all they see is a corner of a table, and then the entire screen goes black as Yuri shoves the camera down into the fabric of the couch.

  
“Should we hang up?” Yuuri mutters to Victor.

  
“It’s just getting good, shh,” Victor hushes him.

  
“I will be in the south of France with Sara,” Mila is saying when Yuuri and Victor both stop talking, “I’m not cat-sitting your furry little disaster.”

  
Yuuri thinks that’s a little unfair. He’s met Potya. She’s a cat, but otherwise, she’s ok.

  
The screen comes back up, and it’s on Mila’s face. She looks extraordinarily composed for someone squabbling with Yuri. Yuri tells her, “You don’t even know when I’m going. _If_ I’m going, which--”

  
“Doesn’t matter!” Mila interrupts him. “In France! With Sara! Ask Yakov, or take your cat with you!”

  
“You can’t just take an animal to Japan!” Yuri squawks, and the camera comes back to his face to show that Mila has finally let go of his ear.

  
“He’s right,” Victor stage whispers, “you can’t. It’s a whole thing.”

  
Makkachin huffs and swipes half-heartedly at the side of Victor’s head, like she’s the one who had to fill out all the paperwork.

  
“Sorry we don’t like _rabies,_ ” Yuuri huffs.

  
.x.

  
Their things from St. Petersburg finally arrive. Yuuri’s _skates_ arrive, and suddenly it’s time to get serious about training for the upcoming season.

  
Going back to training is hard. Not because Yuuri’s getting older (although he is), or because keeping the weight off is harder (which it is), or because his joints ache even after he’s cooled down and gone home and climbed into bed.

  
Training is training. Victor pushes exactly as hard as he did before, mad smiles and madder ideas about how Yuuri’s body should move at 20 kilometers an hour, separated from hard ice by bare millimeters of steel. He’d settled on some nebulous concept of gratification for Yuuri’s theme last year, manifest in dramatic quads and sharp step sequences that inevitably made Yuuri envision grinding sweet kids like Minami beneath his heels. Sometime in the beginning of nailing down the costume designs, Yuuri had asked to see Victor’s sketches. Victor asked how Yuuri felt about thigh-high boots. Yuuri banned D-rings from both of their costumes, as a preventive measure, and then eventually had to negotiate himself into completely extraneous gloves in exchange for Victor giving up a top mostly made of nude fishnet cutaways. He’d had to bribe Yuuko into answering any questions her daughters came up with in the course of watching their programs, and Victor into _not_ answering.

  
This year, Yuuri’s doing a Ghibli mash-up. He wants to be able to show the baby the skates he did the year she was born.

  
So training hasn’t changed. Going back is hard specifically right now because Mari is pregnant, and training is all about Yuuri. Yuuri’s diet, Yuuri’s abysmal sleep schedule, Yuuri’s anxiety, Yuuri’s imminent last-minute international travel arrangements. None of which is actually getting handled by Yuuri himself--he doesn’t have time to think his own name.

  
Victor takes care of everything. He road maps Yuuri’s days with color-coded spreadsheets that live on his laptop, and then he sets his shoulders and herds Yuuri through. After practice, Yuuri comes home to the inn and collapses while Victor clicks over to the adjacent workbook on his laptop, which is for herding Mari. Doctor’s appointments and running nutritional charts, distractions from nicotine cravings. Everything.

  
Once, Yuuri saw Victor and his mom studiously considering the tables in the inn’s common room with a foreboding doom, and the next time he’d wandered into the room, there was a single firm-backed floor chair among the cushions. No one was touching it. Another time, coming out of the locker room at Ice Castle after packing up his gear, he overheard Victor soliciting advice about body pillows from Yuuko. Two days later, there was a new body pillow in their bed and a charge on Victor’s account for three more that weren’t.

  
More than anything, Yuuri is touched by Victor’s concern over Mari’s health and pregnancy. But it’s hard, too, when Yuuri’s sitting in front of his laptop watching quarter-speed frames of his own body, and Victor’s sitting with Mari, attention focused for the slightest movement under the stretched fabric of her shirt.

  
These are the most important people in Yuuri’s life. And for as long as Mari and Victor have known each other, Yuuri’s adoration has been what they have in common.

  
But it’s fine, if they no longer need him to be the bridge between them, if he’s not their only point of connection anymore. It’s fine that Victor and Mari are spending all their time on this whole other complex, all-consuming thing while Yuuri calculates and recalculates base scores. It’s really no one’s fault but his own.

  
.x.

  
Yuri comes out to Japan about three weeks before the end of July. He says he was literally weighing up potential burial grounds for Yakov’s remains when he decided Japan was the better part of valor. He says it was a last minute decision. But Yuuri gets an email with his flight itinerary on it a respectable two weeks before Yuri actually shows up.

  
Loop, Axel, and Lutz flip their shit.

  
There’s an impromptu party, with music and salty snacks, until the clock starts winding up to midnight and Takeshi bargains the girls back home and into bed with promises of an extravagant breakfast out tomorrow.

  
When they’re gone, Mari pulls out several cans of beer which she sets on the table between them with great authority. “I am living vicariously through you,” she declares, pointing at Yuuri and Yuuko. “Don’t let me down.”

  
“Make sure I keep my clothes on,” Yuuri says to Victor.

  
“I certainly won’t,” Victor promises.

  
Yuuri gamely grabs a can anyway. For his sister.

  
They stay in the downstairs common room, because Yuuri doesn’t trust Yuuko to navigate back down the stairs once she’s ready to go home. There are still two actual guests, some west European tourists who tie their yukata wrong and try to eat absolutely everything they’re served with chopsticks, but they’re sitting quietly over a travel-sized chessboard and can’t speak Saga-ben in the slightest.

  
It’s as good as alone as they ever get at the inn.

  
Mari, either despite or precisely because of her claim of vicarious indulgence vis-a-vis Yuuri and Yuuko, fights sleep for another twenty minutes, and then retires to bed.

  
“So how long are you staying?” Yuuko asks Yuri at the top of her fourth can.

  
Yuri lifts his chin up and smirks, looks at Yuuko from the corner of his eyes. He says, “What, sick of me already?”

  
Victor answers, “Yes.”

  
Yuri drops his chin back down and stares at Victor head on. “You begged me to come,” Yuri says smugly. “I’ll damn well stay as long as I want.”

  
“The girls are already so excited,” Yuuko gushes beside him. “It’s their birthday in a few days, you know.”

  
“Wow, what great timing,” Victor goads, without ever looking away from Yuuko. “You’re taking them to an amusement park, right?”

  
“I don’t know what we were thinking,” Yuuko confesses with tipsy glee. “They totally outnumber us, and that place is going to be _packed_. We’re going to lose one of them, probably.”

  
“That’s what you were thinking,” Yuuri deadpans. He’s at the bottom of can number three. He would have kept the thought in his head, otherwise.

  
Yuuko leans across the table with her finger and thumb nearly pressed together and agrees, “Maybe just a little.”

  
“You should take Yurio with you,” Victor suggests. “He’s almost an adult. And he’s blond, so he should be easy to find in the crowd.”

  
It’s a joke. Yuri does not treat it like one. He gets up early on the day of the trip, climbs into the back of a car with Yuuko and Takeshi both half asleep while Lutz, Axel, and Loop ricochet off of each other, and does it without a foul word to anyone except Victor.

  
Yuuko sends them several pictures over the course of the day, of Takeshi and Yuri with various combinations of the triplets making peace signs at the camera or clearly taken in the middle of demanding material goods from the park vendors.

  
Victor saves them all to the cloud in between snapchatting with Mila about the kinds of programs she remembers doing in her junior days. The girls are getting old enough to really start competing, so it makes sense.

  
Yuuri looks at all the new pictures Yuuko’s blowing through his phone storage with and wonders what to do with them.

  
“Am I a bad uncle?” he asks Mari after the lunch rush, when they’ve finished scrubbing out the women’s sauna and are waiting for the latest load of towels to finish washing. They’re side by side in the hallway outside the laundry room. They’ve opened one of the screens, for the afternoon breeze. Their feet dangle just over the grass outside.

  
Mari scratches idly at the side of her leg, where she probably got bitten by a mosquito. She shrugs and says, “You’re not really their uncle.”

  
Yuuri turns away so she can’t see his face, but not quickly enough that she misses the scowl.

  
“Shit,” Mari says immediately, “ok, sorry.” Her hands go to her knees.

  
“It’s not your fault,” Yuuri says. He picked the wrong spot to have this conversation. There’s no room to put any distance between them. “I’m the one who went away to the other side of the world.”

  
Mari says, “You went to train with a coach that could help you be a serious competitor at the international level.”

  
“And I didn’t come _back_ ,” Yuuri reminds her, “not for years.”

  
“Yeah, that sucked,” Mari agrees bluntly. “But the triplets were pretty little. You were gone for a long time they don’t even really remember. They like you _now._ ”

  
Yuuri still doesn’t look at Mari when he says, “They like Yurio more than me.”

  
Mari snorts, “That’s because they have more in common. Like how they all think you’re the greatest thing ever.”

  
“What?” Yuuri whips his whole body around toward Mari with such speed that he nearly falls over. His palms sting from coming down so hard on the wood floor.

  
“It’s a very full circle kind of thing,” Mari continues on, head tilted back thoughtfully. “You were totally in love with Yuuko until middle school--”

  
“ _Mari,_ ” Yuuri groans.

  
“And now Yuuko’s kids have a crush on you.”

  
“Stop being ridiculous,” Yuuri begs in embarrassment.

  
“See, that’s exactly what I mean,” Mari says triumphantly, “Yurio would have agreed with me.”

  
“No, he wouldn’t have,” Yuuri insists. “About what?”

  
“Well, not out loud,” Mari concedes. “And about everything. If Yurio doesn’t have a collection of posters with your face all over them in his room at home, I’ll give up smoking.”

  
“You were already supposed to give up smoking,” Yuuri raises his voice, “ _you’re pregnant_.”

  
“I mean permanently, obviously,” Mari waves away his concern.

  
Yuuri is undeterred. “You’re going to smoke while you’re breastfeeding?”

  
Mari just looks at him.

  
“You’re not breastfeeding?” Yuuri immediately regrets the volume at which he announces this latest development. Heart jumping, he glances both directions down the hall, and then cranes his neck out so he can check that the little section of the back garden they can see doesn’t have Victor lurking in the shadows. He leans back, satisfied Victor isn’t in hearing distance, and frantically says at a much lower volume, “You can’t tell Victor that.”

  
“Is Victor volunteering to breastfeed in my place?” Mari asks, then immediately reverses her own stance with, “No,  don’t answer that.” Mari turns an irritated look to her own chest. “I’m not saying I’m definitely not going to. I’m just saying, my nipples are already killing me, and the worst I’m doing is wearing a cotton bra.”

  
Yuuri’s own hands find their way protectively to his chest.

  
Mari has a gleefully evil smile on her face when she looks back up at him and says, “Babies have teeth, Yuuri.”

  
Yuuri just whimpers, then sticks his hands into his armpits and tucks his head to his chest.

  
.x.

  
Seven months in. They are closer to having-a-baby than not-having-a-baby, but they still haven’t talked about it. They don’t need to. Victor is obviously smitten with the idea of having kids.

  
He talks to Mari’s stomach as much as he talks to Mari, hands pressed gently to the growing curve.

  
“She’s going to remember this,” Victor says, awed and giddy and not _quite_ correct. He talks to the baby about Yuuri’s training, and Mari’s favorite game shows, and about random things around Hasetsu. The people at the bars and on the beach. The weathered wishes tied to a tree in the park. The way the little mutt owned by the family at the end of the street sneezes like a dying beast when the wildflowers start blooming.

  
“I have to tell the baby about this,” Victor declares at least once a day.

  
“This, too?” Yuuri asks once when they’re picking discarded shells in a tide pool.

  
“I’m telling her all about Hasetsu,” Victor says matter-of-factly, “so when she’s born, this will all be familiar.”

  
In the quiet hours at the inn, Victor plays his favorite music from Yuuri’s early days in ballet on his laptop, songs he thinks will inspire a growing child. Someone--probably their dad--lets slip about the boxes of Mari’s taped ballet recitals, ages 3 1/2 to 10. That gets a playlist, too.

  
The first few pages of the browser history on Victor’s laptop are consistently pregnancy blogs and baby furniture recalls. His bookmarks are filled with pages for miniature clothing with entirely unjustifiable price tags that Victor doesn’t even buy because in this, of all things, he is superstitious. When Victor reads that Mari should eat more fish, for the omega-3 fatty acids, he goes out immediately and buys it. When Victor reads that Mari shouldn’t eat fish, because of the mercury, he immediately goes out and buys beef and pork and chicken, and lurks around the kitchen until their mom assures him all the fish has been served to the guests instead.

  
What’s Yuuri’s getting at here is, Victor is _invested_.

  
So what’s there to talk about?

  
.x.

  
The closet space Yuri slept in when Victor was sleeping in the banquet room has gone back to being closet space now that the banquet room is being used for banquets again. So Yuri stays with the Nishigori for the three weeks he’s in Hasetsu. They don’t have a spare bedroom, but they moved to a bigger house at the end of last summer, and there’s enough space in the living room to lay out an extra futon without moving any of the furniture around too much.

  
The fact that there’s no room in the family wing of the inn for guests isn’t a revelation, but it is a reminder.

  
“We need our own place,” Yuuri says to Mari just before Yuri’s time in town is up. “There’s not enough room here for me and Victor, and you, _and_ Mom and Dad, and the baby.”

   
They’re the only ones in the family living room. Yuri, after a full day of training and a long, loud dinner with the family, had announced he was leaving for Yuuko and Takeshi’s place at the same time Victor had picked up Makkachin’s leash for her evening walk. Not wanting to butt in, Yuuri had gone upstairs with his sister, and now they’re both sitting on a sofa that has a 1 in 2 chance of being the one Yuuri and Victor made out on once upon a time.

  
Yuuri has not brought up the sofa’s dubious history.

  
Mari gives him a long glance, like she both suspects the truth and has compelling evidence that’s not in Yuuri’s favor, but all she says is, “You trying to kick me out?”

  
“No,” Yuuri sighs, “no, you can stay. We should leave. I’ve been dropping hints for forever, but Victor totally ignores them.”

  
Mari pulls the pillow he’s curled up around out of his lap and socks him hard in the shoulder with it. “Have you tried being blunt?” she asks.

  
“Yes,” Yuuri lies immediately and in vain.

  
“Victor will give the baby your bed and sleep underneath it if you let him,” Mari predicts ominously as she withdraws the pillow and starts settling it in behind her back. “She’ll be the only kid at school not afraid of monsters under the bed, because there’s won’t be any room with _Victor already there_.”

  
Yuuri replies, “I know, but he hates all the other towns around here.”

  
He’s not exaggerating. The last several trips they’ve taken to Hasetsu, Yuuri and Victor have detoured on small vacations to nearby towns. Some of them have been bigger than Hasetsu, or further inland, or stung out all along the waterfront, so every building has an ocean view. All of them variations on a seaside town, a Japanese resort town. Regardless, they have all concluded the same way: Victor decides the ramen at the one place they went to was too limp/the beach was too cold/the market smelled weird/the traffic was too dangerous. And Yuuri just gets more and more frustrated.

  
“Does he want to move back to Russia?” Mari asks him.

  
Yuuri can’t even wrap his head around the concept. “I could barely get him to stay in Russia long enough to finish the season after you told us you were pregnant,” he reminds Mari, “there’s no way he’ll want to move back once the baby’s born.”

  
Mari’s nodding at him sharply before he’s even finished the sentence. “Then you’ll have to stay in Hasetsu.”

  
“There aren’t a lot of places in Hasestu to live for a new family, though...” Yuuri says.

  
“Yuuko and Takeshi did it,” Mari argues, and then leans down to pull his laptop out from under the sofa. It’s a very impressive move, in that Mari’s lap has started vanishing with an increasing rapidity and probably only the years of martial arts that followed ballet are allowing Mari to continue folding forward at all as the baby grows bigger.

  
Mari drops Yuuri’s laptop in his lap with the casual disregard of someone who doesn’t worry about heavy objects falling into their laps. Yuuri winces reflexively, but the impact doesn’t do any real damage. Just escalates several tender spots on his thighs from potential bruises to almost definite bruises.

  
Mari tells him, “Look through some listings together when Victor gets back from walking Makkachin.”

  
This is both wise advice and completely unfair. Victor always takes his time coming back inside from Makkachin’s walk. He’ll sit on the floor by the entry way while Makkachin, fur warm from the evening sun on her back, braces both front paws on his shoulders. She pants hugely in his face, and Victor lets her, holding one of her ears in either hand and bouncing them up and down in rhythm with nonsense cooing.

  
It’s as relaxed as Victor ever gets except right after sex.

  
“Yeah, OK,” Yuuri gives in. He starts opening tabs.

  
.x.

  
Yuuri’s a professional athlete with multiple international titles. He wakes up at 4 in the morning, even on rest days.

  
When he turns over in the bed, Victor is stretched out on his side, staring back with his eyes half-lidded. It’s not voluntary. The coy tilt of his eyebrows is foremost in defense of continued sleep. Victor is terrible to wake up.

  
Victor is also an opportunist. He ducks his head down, purposeful, and puts his open palm against Yuuri’s chest where his heart is ramping up to a clip that’s nowhere near resting tempo. “Yuuri,” he breathes against Yuuri’s skin, absolutely shameless, and rolls over onto Yuuri’s bare chest.

  
Yeah. Yuuri’s for that.

  
There’s barely any light in the room as Victor spreads his legs over Yuuri’s hips and sinks down. Yuuri works by memory and touch, clutches Victor’s hip with lube slick fingers and blunt nails on one hand and places the other in the small of his back. Above him, Victor twists his hands into the sheets and arches into Yuuri’s hold, chanting _Yuuri, Yuuri, Yuuri._

  
He doesn’t let Yuuri pull out immediately after he comes. Instead, Victor leans forward into Yuuri’s embrace so their bodies press together, skin tacky and warm where they touch. He puts his head down beside Yuuri’s and tries to catch his breath. Every exhale raises goosebumps along Yuuri’s shoulder.

  
“Should let me clean you up,” Yuuri says when his tongue finally finds words again. It’s harder than it could be because Victor keeps running light fingers up his side and making him twitch.

  
Victor kisses his jaw. He draws his hand up Yuuri’s ribs, fingernails dragging through drying sweat. “You take such good care of me,” Victor murmurs, but in the quiet of the room he might as well have shouted.

  
They keep laying together until Yuuri’s legs begin to ache, which means Victor’s back probably aches and it’s time to move.

  
“We can’t stay like this,” he tells Victor.

  
Reluctantly, Victor moves so Yuuri can slip the rest of the way out. When they’re separated, Yuuri rolls over and fishes wet wipes out of the pack in their bedside drawer to wipe between Victor’s legs and over his stomach, then another for himself. Victor resituates himself, Yuuri still on his back and Victor on his side with one leg and one arm holding Yuuri down to the bed.

  
“Yuuri,” Victor says as Yuuri starts drifting back to sleep.

  
“Hmph?”

  
It’s a long time before Victor continues. “I want our kids to have your eyes,” he says, but quietly, as if there’s anyone else in the room to overhear him except for Yuuri. “And your nose, and your hair, and your lips.” Unerringly, in the dark, he presses his thumb to the corner of Yuuri’s mouth and traces the shape of his upper lip.

  
“What if I want them to have _your_ eyes?” Yuuri says against the pad of Victor’s thumb. Victor’s skin tastes like his own. Yuuri already feels like he’s dreaming.

  
“I like yours more,” Victor responds lightly. His hand goes up to Yuuri’s hair. “I like your everything.”

  
Yuuri chortles, “This is pointless. I want them to have your lips, you want them to have mine.”

  
“Guess we’ll have to compromise,” Victor concedes. “Your eyes, my hair?”

  
“OK,” Yuuri agrees. They’re imaginary kids, he figures they can look however Victor wants them to.

  
.x.

  
Mari’s last few months being pregnant come and go with little fanfare, 8, then 9, and then 10. Then week 40 rolls into week 40 and 3 days. Then week 41.

  
“I warned you,” their mother says kindly, patting Mari’s hand and waving a paper fan directly in her face. It’s the first week of October and the weather is blisteringly hot, because this summer is determined to last forever just like Mari’s pregnancy.

  
Their mother says, “It’s always this way with the first born. You were two whole weeks late! And Yuuri,” here she suspends fanning Mari briefly, to indicate Yuuri where he’s on his hands and knees, trying to rewrite the geometry of the room through sheer will in order to get the electric fan plugged in and close enough to Mari to make a difference, “Yuuri was a week and a half _early_.”

  
“Good thing, too. We came back home from the hospital just a few hours before the blizzard hit!” their dad says fondly. “Such a considerate boy, right from the start,” he praises, as though Yuuri had done something more extraordinary than being born.

  
“It’s all Victor’s fault, anyway,” Mari grumbles, crossing her arms on the table and then putting her head in them. “He made the baby too comfortable, with all his cooing and touching and ridiculous platitudes. Now she doesn’t want to come out.”

  
“It only counts if _you_ do it,” their dad says, chuckling. He presses Mari’s sweating water glass closer to her hands and tells her, “Here, drink a little more.”

  
“I’m already pissing every ten minutes, Dad,” Mari tells him acidly, but their dad only smiles and pats her hand with a loving expression just on the border of tears.

  
Makkachin gives Mari’s toes a conciliatory lick. She’s wearing a bag of crushed ice on her back, which Mari had deemed too cold to tolerate.

  
Victor comes back into the living room with the pack of wet wipes they keep in the fridge. He kneels by Mari’s side and presents them to her over Makkachin’s prone figure, both hands out.

  
Mari grabs a few, lifts her shirt, and rubs. They’re upstairs, so it’s only family in the room, but Yuuri doubts it would have made a difference to Mari if they had been among the guests. It’s _miserably_ hot.

  
Yuuri would like some of the wipes, himself. His shorts keep bunching up under his balls, which is annoying and a little embarrassing even though literally everyone in this room has seen his naked dick in just the past week. But if he pulls his shorts down any further, his thighs stick to each other instead of the fabric, itchy and hot.

  
“This is the worst,” Mari groans.

  
“I’m sorry,” Victor apologizes, skin going pink in the heat. “If I could trade places with you, I would.”

  
Mari rolls her neck, swiping carefully along her own throat. When she’s done, she looks at Victor and says, “I know.”

  
She holds her hand out for another wipe, which Victor promptly gives her. She asks, “But then who would go with Yuuri to his competitions?”

  
Victor scoffs, “You think I wouldn’t still be there? I would.”

  
Yuuri’s first Grand Prix event of the year starts in 42 hours. He and Victor are supposed to leave for the train station in two hours and get on a plane. Yuuri is supposed to skate a stirring gold-medal tribute to escapism. Afterwards, he will probably be expected to hold an insightful conversation about his artistic vision.

  
Yuuri is _not_ prepared.

  
But the clock ticks on, and then Yuuko arrives to take them to the train station. Their parents pause in hovering around Mari long enough to bundle Yuuri and Victor and all of their accessory luggage in the car, and the next thing Yuuri knows, they’re in their seats on the train and Victor is carefully sprawled in the opposite direction of Yuuri, trying to give him more space than they actually have across the tiny seats.

  
“Vitya,” Yuuri calls to him when he notices the distance.

  
“Yes?”

  
Yuuri opens his arms and reaches out for Victor with gimme hands. Victor leans forward immediately, and they hold each other’s faces, noses brushing.

  
“Vitya,” Yuuri says quietly, with the sound of the train driving forwards under their feet, “where are we going?”

  
Victor blinks slowly.

  
“I mean, what country? No, don’t laugh--”

  
“I’m sorry,” Victor laughs, “I”ll stop, just--hold on...”

  
There’s several moments of panic while Victor tries to show Yuuri their plane tickets, only to realize he has packed them in Yuuri’s carry-on, folded inside his short program costume, instead of his own bag.

  
Somehow, they don’t miss their plane or their connection.

  
.x.

  
Yuuri skates. He scores 5 points lower than the worst they’d figured he’d do, but he takes the gold.

  
Mari still hasn’t gone into labor by the time they’re getting on the plane back home.

  
Victor stares forlornly at the kitschy souvenirs in one of the airport gift shops until Yuuri drags him into the quietest corner of their gate and puts his head in his lap, feeling drained and stretched thin and ready to go home.

  
.x.

  
Mari’s son is born 16 days late.

  
“What the hell do you mean it’s a _boy?_ ” Yuri hisses through clenched teeth when Victor finally answers the video call.

  
Victor is unfazed. He hasn’t stopped smiling once in the last half hour. “Well, the baby Mari’s been carrying around for the past ten months was born a little while ago, and when they pulled him out, he had--”

  
“ _Victor,_ ” Yuuri and Yuri say at the same time and with roughly the same amount of patience.

  
“You asked,” Victor says cheerfully. “It’s fairly common, actually. Ultrasounds aren’t as reliable as you’d think.”

  
Also, no one had exactly asked at any of Mari’s appointments. Someone had simply picked early in the first few months, said _Mari’s daughter,_ and they’d all just gone along with it.

  
Yuri scowls from the other side of the phone screen for several long seconds. He takes a deep breath in and then out, and then he repeats, “A boy?”

  
Victor slumps sideways, so his head’s on Yuuri’s shoulder. Yuuri sees his own face slide most of the way into the little square off to the side the screen. He waves, briefly, and Yuri flicks his hand up in a quick, dismissive greeting.

  
Victor says, “Yes, Yura. Until he gets big enough to make these kinds of decisions for himself, and provided none of us screw him up so badly that he’s afraid to, he’s a boy.”

  
Yuuri squirms, has to give Victor a grateful little squeeze to his thigh. Nothing improper, though Victor would certainly try to make more of it if he were even slightly less distracted with gushing to Yuri about the baby’s big brown eyes _just like Yuuri’s, my wish came true!_ or if he had slept more than three hours in the past 36. They’d barely arrived back at the inn and started settling in when Mari went into labor.

  
On the phone, Yuri hunches his shoulders and won’t look directly at the camera. Behind his head, Yuuri can see a slice of wall that definitely does not belong to Yuri’s room or any room at all of Lilia’s.

  
“Are you really that disappointed?” Victor asks.

  
“It’s whatever,” Yuri replies a little too immediately.

  
Yuuri is getting better at reading Yuri’s grouchy faces. This one in particular has a pronounced slant of loss. Yuuri is fairly certain that up until two minutes ago, Yuri was harboring many rich and detailed plans about buying mini leopard printed and kitten themed onesies which he’s now resigning himself to never getting to fulfill.

  
Victor has the same idea, and significantly less tact. “Oh, Yura, are you upset because they only put cats on girl clothes?”

  
“ _Shut up_ ,” Yuri groans, switching over to Russian, “you fucking idiot, fuck your mom.”

  
“You can’t be upset, he’s really beautiful,” Victor presses on, like Yuri hasn’t said anything at all and certainly hasn’t initiated a language change. “I mean, he looks just like Yuuri.”

  
“I think you mean he looks just like Mari,” Yuuri sighs, and lets his head fall back a little.

  
“And Mari looks just like _you_ ,” Victor insists.

  
Yuuri has taken five different 20-minute naps on plastic chairs that were explicitly designed to prevent napping, and has lost significantly more fluid crying than he’s replenished with the 3 shitty hospital coffees he drank after giving up on naps. He doesn’t have the energy to argue.

  
“I thought all babies were ugly,” Yuri mutters. “With the scrunched faces and the weird little heads and all the--you know. Gunk and stuff. Weird.”

  
“Not _Mari’s_ ,” Victor insists, completely ignoring that fact that Mari’s son is, indeed, at just a little over an hour old, fairly lumpy, and smushed, and red, and blotchy. “He’s beautiful. He’s perfect!”

  
“Just because you say it doesn’t make it true,” Yuri counters.

  
“Are you calling me a _liar?_ ” Victor says, eyes narrowing and fingers swiping Yuri’s face into a smaller box so he can get to his collection of baby pictures. There are exactly forty-nine so far.

  
“I’m saying maybe your eyesight’s going, old man,” Yuri says as Yuuri watches Victor try to send eight pictures simultaneously.

  
Victor’s phone, use to such ludicrous demands, puts up only a momentary protest during which everything on the screen freezes, and then all eight pictures send up little notifications that they’ve arrived at their destination.

  
“I’ll wait,” Victor says smugly, “for your apology.”

  
.x.

  
Mari names her son Keiki, which Yuuri thinks is just as well since everyone’s been expecting a little girl this whole time.

  
Victor’s interest in Keiki’s name is purely typographical. “Which kanji, Mari?” he asks, huddled over his phone in the hospital on day seven of Mari’s stay.

  
Yuuri, sitting on the bed beside his sister, warns, “Don’t answer that. He’s just going to put it all over the internet.”

  
“So _what_ ,” Victor argues, “he’s perfect, why shouldn’t I brag?”

  
Mari tells him sternly, “Not if you’re sharing shitty pictures. Give me your phone.”

  
“Who has shitty pictures of Keiki,” Victor grumbles, but he gives her his phone. Mari swipes through Victor’s baby album, which, Yuuri reads over his sister’s folder, has grown to a staggering 372 pictures. In seven days.

  
Truly this is unconditional love. A week ago, Yuuri knew that as adorable as he found his nephew, a newborn was still a newborn, and they looked _weird_. Now though, even in the pictures where Keiki is just a few hours old, where his skin is wrinkled and pinched, and his eyelashes are gummy, and his limbs are all sticking out at unsettling inhuman angles, all Yuuri can think is a quiet, insistent _oh_.

  
Mari scrolls through the many, many pictures of Keiki on Victor’s phone with an unsatisfied slant to her brow. The skin around her eyes is still puffy and a little bruised. She looks so tired. She’s scheduled to go home in the afternoon, and between their parents, Yuuri, and Victor, she won’t even have the chance to do anything more strenuous than lift a spoon for the next two months, but Yuuri still has an urge in that moment to pull the curtains close, lock the door, bundle the blanket up under her chin, and let her rest.

  
Victor, getting impatient with his hands empty, slinks off to the bassinet that Keiki’s been napping in.

  
“Don’t you wake him,” Yuuri warns, but it’s not a very strong warning and Victor is already pulling Keiki out of the bed and cradling him close.

  
“He was already awake,” Victor mostly lies, as Keiki’s mouth opens in a far bigger ‘o’ than seems plausible, stretching his chubby cheeks. When he’s done yawning, Keiki opens his eyes in a slow progression, blinking them closed and then opening them a little wider each time. Like Victor waking up in the morning. Keiki’s brown gaze is unfocused and his nose is scrunched at the light, so he looks very much like he’s judging Victor in the picture Mari takes. Victor is rapt.

  
“That’ll do,” Mari says in satisfaction, uploading the picture on Victor’s account with Keiki’s name in the tags. She passes the phone to Yuuri with, “He probably wants it in Russian, too.”

  
“Vitya, spell Keiki’s name in Cyrillic letters,” Yuuri calls, shifting the keyboard over from the kana.

  
Victor very clearly looks conflicted. Give up the baby? Or let Yuuri have free reign over Keiki’s debut on Victor’s social media?

  
Yuuri catches the look. He narrows his eyes. “ _What?_ ” he says sharply in Russian.

  
“Just give me the baby,” Mari says, and Victor probably doesn’t even conceive of arguing. He hands Keiki over to Mari and then takes his phone from Yuuri. He sits in one of the chairs drawn up to the bed, so Yuuri and Mari on the bed and Victor in the chair are all arranged in a gentle curve around Keiki.

  
“That’s wrong,” Yuuri says, watching Victor round out the trifecta of Keiki’s name with an attempt at romanization. “It’s not--not _cake_ ,” he laughs, bumping his shoulder into his husband’s.

  
“That’s what it sounds like,” Victor tells him, “and he’s definitely sweet enough.”

  
“Did you lick him? Stop being sappy,” Yuuri scoffs, “and give me that.”

  
Victor hands over his phone again. Then he sighs dramatically, “I give up on this language. What’s the extra _i_ for?And how am I supposed to know when it’s _c_ and when it’s _k_?”

  
Yuuri glances up from the phone with a scrutinizing look. “How did you decide on your name?”

  
“Oh,” Victor waves him away, and switches immediately to English without bothering to even attempt stumbling through in Japanese, “there were focus groups. Apparently Viktor with-a-k came off too malevolent. Germanic. People didn’t like it much. _Victor_ , though. They thought that was very noble and appropriately evocative.”

  
Mari gives him a look like she’s 83% sure her English has failed her here. “You polled the audience?”

  
“I paid a PR team to do it anyway,” Victor says like that’s a natural thing to say. And then his phone starts buzzing with notifications from his Instagram and doesn’t stop. Victor picks it up with an easy, “Whoops,” and absently taps the many, many alerts into silence.

  
Yuuri ducks his head so he doesn’t have to look his sister in the eyes and puts a gentle finger up to Keiki’s cheek. “Sorry, kiddo.”

  
Keiki’s eye on the side Yuuri’s touching scrunches up and his mouth opens, lopsided, as he tries to do something about the new sensation. He looks like he’s about to sneeze.

  
“Should have taken a picture of _that,_ ” Mari says.

  
.x.

  
Mari names her son Keiki, and everyone else immediately starts deriving nicknames to use instead.

  
Their parents go with Kei-chan. Axel, Lutz, and Loop campaign heavily for Salchow, or Flip, but ultimately are unable to unite behind a single option, and the measure ends up DOA.

  
Yuri, who is a coward, calls him Kedya over the phone and in the little cards that accompany his various kitty-faced and tiger-stripped additions to Keiki’s wardrobe.

  
Victor has no such compunctions. Nor, in fact, any allegiance to a particular tradition. According to Victor, Keiki is Shortcake, Kesha, Keshenushka, Keick, and Ichiban. Especially Ichiban.

  
“Ichiban,” Victor will say, settling down on his stomach in front of Keiki’s bouncy chair, “what should we do with today?”

  
Or, “Ichiban, I am _so_ happy to see your face!” after they come home from a competition.

  
And when the expensive, all organic, number one pediatrician recommended baby soap raises ugly red hives all over Keiki’s back, Victor says, “They aren’t good enough for you, Ichiban.”

  
Victor mostly speaks standard Japanese, because Yuuri mostly speaks standard Japanese, when he’s sober. But Victor spent too much time early on learning Japanese exclusively from Yuuri’s parents and Yuuri’s parents’ neighbors. Even now, there are some things--these things-- that only ever come out in Saga-ben. They’re things he learned by rote, says by rote, but means, entirely and sincerely.

  
.x.

  
“You’re spoiling him,” Mari criticizes on her first day off of bed rest, gaze boring a hole into Yuuri’s head. She’s recovered well, and now, a couple of months away from the birth, she has energy to spare on such activities as light work around the inn or harassing her little brother.

  
Yuuri does not meet Mari’s eyes.

  
Across the room, Victor is spread out on his back on the floor with Keiki on his chest. Keiki’s hands are curled into little fists right at the top of Victor’s rib cage, and he holds his head up by tilting it to the side, with his chin hooked over his forearm.

  
So far, Victor has bought Keiki two monogrammed fleece blankets, 13 pairs of leg warmers, three baby wipe warmers, and new jinbei at the rate of approximately one a week.

  
Mari pinches the shell of Yuuri’s ear, and Yuuri’s vision momentarily blurs beneath the pain. “You’re not listening to me.”

  
“I”m listening!” Yuuri hisses back in a lower voice, hoping they don’t draw Victor’s attention. He tries to think of how to convince Mari this isn’t as bad as it looks in a way that doesn’t acknowledge just how bad it looks.

  
And he resents the implication that this is somehow his fault. Victor put half the Penguin catalog in his shopping cart the day after Mari gave birth, and hardly any of it actually came into the inn. _Yuuri_ did that.

  
Honestly, though, Victor doesn’t dote on Keiki nearly as much as Yuuri can tell he wants to. Between their parents being stalwart baby hoarders and Yuuri still being right in the middle of his competitive season, Victor only gets about an hour and a half of quality baby time each day between breakfast and dinner. That’s on a good day.

  
“What do you want me to do here?” Yuuri snipes at his sister. “’Sorry, Victor, I know he’s a sweet, tiny baby you’re related to, but could you try loving Keiki less? Thanks!’ What kind of message is that?”

  
“The kind that doesn’t end in your early grave,” Mari retorts darkly, and makes sure to step on his toes as she leaves the room to go sit a shift at the front desk.

  
Makkachin watches her go from her perch on the couch.

  
Yuuri goes to sit with Victor and Keiki. He shouldn’t have worried about drawing Victor’s attention earlier, because anything more than a half meter’s distance from Keiki is entirely outside of his radius of concern. Victor doesn’t look up until Yuuri’s on top of him, sitting down at his side.

  
“Hey,” Yuuri says, and notices one of Keiki’s knees has dragged the bottom of Victor’s threadbare t-shirt up away from the waistband of his pants. Yuuri slides his hand under Keiki’s leg and lifts him up just enough to smooth the fabric back down over Victor’s stomach. “What are you two talking about?” he asks.

  
“Mari’s latest boyband crush,” Victor answers easily, attention swinging back over to Keiki. “Mama really likes that blond one, doesn’t she, Ichiban? She has a type.”

  
She does. She and Yuuri have this in common, although he hasn’t shared this insight with Victor. He’s not sure how to feel about the fact that Victor’s figured it out on his own.

  
Keiki sucks hard on his own wrist, which makes little squelching noises. Then a line of spit rolls down his wrist.

  
“Ah, Kesha, it seems you’ve sprung a leak,” Victor says and wipes away the drool with his finger. “Better this end than the other, though, I guess.”

  
Keiki stares at him blankly, without the slightest clue of what Victor’s talking about. If Keiki had sprung a leak on the other end, Victor would have been just as quick and efficient in his response. Victor is unduly good at changing diapers. Victor is good at buttoning all the little buttons on Keiki’s clothes the right way on the first try. He’s good at getting all of Keiki’s spit-up on the spit-up rag, and not his own shirt.

  
“You’re good with him,” Yuuri says. He’s staring at Victor’s mouth, at Victor’s eyes scrunched up in a pleased smile.

  
Slightly breathless, Victor says, “Yuuri, what choice did I have?”

  
All this time, Victor, fueled by their parents’ photo albums, has been picturing the newest Katsuki as a baby Mari clone, or a miniature Yuuri. He’s been expecting round, brown eyes and thick sweeps of dark hair at odds with gravity.

  
Instead, Yuuri gets this: his husband and his nephew, heads tilted toward each other in a patch of winter sun that lights their hair with the same fuzzy white aura at the edges. Keiki’s hair is still absolutely brown, but a light brown, wispy in a way that Mari and Yuuri’s never was. Wispy like Victor’s might have been, as a baby.

  
Suddenly, Yuuri can see it. He can picture exactly what Victor must have looked like as a baby, as a toddler, as a child with missing teeth. The image is clear in his head, even though he’s never seen a picture of Victor younger than 14.

  
Seven year old Yuuri had no idea what he was talking about.

  
“I want ten,” he says. It comes into his head abruptly, but once it’s there, it’s too big to contain to himself, quiet and unheard. Yuuri allows a feeble hope that Victor either hasn’t heard him or has no idea what he’s talking about.

  
That hope is dashed when Victor remarks, “Good thing we don’t have to worry about my figure.”

  
It’s clearly a joke. But Victor’s smile turns into the kind of smile that means he is either angry or sad. Yuuri feels his mood turn south.

  
“You’re upset,” Victor says next, pulling in the edges of his own distress in response to Yuuri’s anxiety.

  
Yuuri replies, “I’m upset? You’re upset!”

  
“I’m not--”

  
“Vitya, you’re angry, or sad, or-- I don’t know. You were happy a moment ago.”

  
Victor does not argue this point.

  
“Did you...did you not want to retire?” Yuuri asks.

  
That, surprisingly, seems to genuinely relive Victor. “No,” he answers immediately and fervently, “I did. I’m happy I did, I promise.”

  
“Then what?” Yuuri presses, reaching down to take Victor’s hand. “You said that thing about your weight like it really bothered you.”

  
“Ah, it’s nothing,” Victor straight up _lies_.

  
Keiki, sensing the attention has strayed from him, wiggles on Victor’s chest and nearly slides to the floor. Victor lays his free hand over the whole of his back, pinning him securely in place.

  
“Do you want to have kids?” Yuuri hears himself asking, which is stupid. Victor definitely wants kids. He wants them with Yuuri, even. He's made that abundantly clear, in a thousand ways, again and again. He hasn't been _subtle._

  
Yuuri’s brain circles deliberately around this idea, that Victor wants kids with him, then shifts through a tight 3 turn and doubles back.

  
His voice sounds too loud to his own ears when he asks, “Do you want to have my babies?”

  
Victor tilts his head up so he’s staring straight at the ceiling. He avoids Yuuri’s eyes.

  
“Vitya?” Yuuri says. He can’t believe he said that. He can’t believe he _thought that._

  
“It’s--” Victor says, and then his throat bobs, and no words come out even though his mouth is open. He tries again. “I know it isn’t-- it’s not something that can happen,” he says. He holds himself very still. His cheeks are going pink. “I know we’ll have to adopt, or, surrogacy? I know.”

  
“....but?” Yuuri asks. He’s still holding Victor’s hand. His fingers are losing sensation.

  
“But,” Victor repeats. “Yes.”

  
Yuuri says, “Oh.” He means to say, _Anything you want. I’ll get it for you, I’ll give it to you_ , except of course, that’s not true. He can’t.

  
Victor finally looks at him again, and his expression rearranges into one of puzzlement. “What’s with that face? You look like I just told you Mila’s marrying Chris.”

  
“You couldn’t have surprised me more if you had,” Yuuri admits.

  
“Surprised you how?” Victor asks.

  
“With--wanting to have babies!” Yuuri says, throwing his free hand restlessly up in the air to demonstrate how totally this idea has blindsided him.

  
Victor just sighs, drawing Yuuri’s hand to his chest, right beside Keiki’s head. “Yuuri,” he says with mild exasperation, “we’ve talked about this.”

  
.x.

  
Yuuri maybe owes his sister an apology.

  
.x.

  
At the end of December, everyone flies up with Yuuri for Nationals.

  
It’s the first time in three years that Victor’s been able to make it to the competition in person. It’s the first time Yuuri’s mom and dad have gone ever.

  
His parents and Mari and Minako sit together in the stands, waving a huge banner with his name on it. Victor, as his coach, remains down at the boards. He hugs Yuuri when he skates off the ice after his short program, presses a quick, chaste kiss to his cheek. Then they huddle together to see how badly Yuuri has trounced the other skaters.

  
“It’s almost your birthday,” Yuuri says evenly as they wait for his scores.

  
Victor’s nice media smile slants sideways, into mischief, but he doesn’t say anything. He just holds out Yuuri’s glasses and, when Yuuri turns toward him, slides them back onto his face.

  
Bracing one hand on Victor’s knee, Yuuri looks past the cameras in way that seems focused and attentive from the other side of a TV screen, and says, “We should talk about what you want.”

  
It’s fine. The crowd is still cheering, they’re not micced. No one who’s not supposed to can hear this conversation.

  
Victor blinks very slowly at Yuuri. “...Right now?” he asks.

  
Yuuri turns slightly, pins Victor with his gaze. He says archly, “I’m talking about babies.”

  
“I know that,” Victor rushes to assure him.

  
“And how we should have them,” Yuuri continues.

  
“Yes, please. I mean, OK,” Victor agrees just as Yuuri’s scores get announced.

  
They’re not his best of the season. They’re not even as good as his Grand Prix final a few weeks before, but he’s in the lead by a wide margin.

  
Yuuri smiles and bows at the cameras, then stands and pulls Victor after him by the hand. They make it into the hallway that leads to the locker rooms, where Yuuri pulls his team jacket back on and Victor maybe presses him against the wall to kiss him and slide his hands around Yuuri’s waist and squeeze before the jacket is zipped up, but none of the other skaters or coaches rushing through while the ice is getting resurfaced see anything, so obviously nothing happened.

  
“This year?” Victor asks eagerly. He doesn’t put any effort into appearing less excited than he is.

  
“Next year,” Yuuri counters. “These things take time.”

  
“No, right, of course,” Victor says, and this time he definitely kisses Yuuri. Over Victor’s shoulder, the coach of a skater who just moved up to the Senior division this season deliberately turns his own blushing face away, puts his hand over his charge’s eyes, and steers them both quickly out to the rink.

  
Yuuri and Victor go to the locker room, so Yuuri can switch his skates for shoes, and they go back out and climb up into the stands beside the rest of his family.

  
No sooner does Yuuri’s butt hit the seat than his mother passes Keiki to him. “You did well,” his mom says with a bright smile right over Keiki’s head. “We’re so proud of you.”

  
“Take the compliment,” Victor interrupts before Yuuri can find some fault in his performance to present in contradiction of his mother’s praise.

  
Yuuri sighs and hugs Keiki close, hiding his face against his nephew’s chest. It’s chilly in the arena. Keiki is bundled up in a quilted jacket and heavy leg warmers with little brown and black puppy faces on the knees. Keiki obligingly lets Yuuri’s huddle close for a few seconds, breathing heavily into his uncle’s hair. Then he squawks and kicks Yuuri in the ribs.

  
Yuuri jerks back and apologizes, “Sorry, sorry! That tickled, right? I didn’t mean to.”

  
Keiki smiles a spit shiny, open smile. Yuuri’s forgiven. He pulls Keiki close again and settles him against his side, getting ready to watch the next routine.

  
There’s a murmur of witness to something unbearably cute that sweeps through the audience. When Yuuri looks up, Minami, making his way through the skaters’ area to the open ice, flails and catches himself on the boards. Weird, but not uncommon--Minami’s hardly the only skater who’s shown himself to be more graceful on ice than off.

  
Then Yuuri looks further up, to the giant TV screen directly across from the stands. He sees his own face, and Keiki’s.

  
Mari leans around their mother and tells Yuuri, “You’re a menace. Give me back my son.”

  
“But I didn’t get to hold him yet,” Victor protests. “Why am I being punished?”

  
“Because you married him,” Mari says flatly.

  
The cameras switch back around to Minami, skating out to center ice, just before Yuuri rolls his eyes. “Don’t drag Vitya--” he starts and doesn’t get to finish.

  
In an embarrassingly practiced move, their mom puts one hand on Yuuri’s shoulder and their dad puts one hand on Mari’s. Yuuri and Mari both close their mouths and settle back into their seats.

  
“Wow,” Victor whispers as the crowd around them goes quiet. “Can I learn to do that? For our kids, I mean,” he clarifies quickly as Yuuri cuts his eyes in his direction.

  
Yuuri’s glare fades. He takes a deep breath in before whispering back, “I hope so.”

 

 


End file.
